It’s been a while, huh? But I have a new Black Friday computer, so it feels like it’s time to get back into the Enderal mines and finish this Let’s Play.
Of course, saying that, I begin by immediately digressing, because I’m in the middle of one of those main story blocks where the game tells you to go do something else for a while and come back later. I think I’m waiting for them to decode the map I got from the moon on where to find the old Pyrean capital?
Like I said, it’s been a while.
… Onward!

- One of the few quests I have left in my quest log is to visit the Dark Valley to track down Erica Braveblood’s mother (also a painter, named Andrasta Braveblood) who for some godawful reason decided to go live in the middle of an old, haunted battlefield or something.
Basically, whenever someone mentions the Dark Valley, it’s in the context of ‘that place with all the skeletons,’ more or less.

- The Myrad keepers have an option to take you to the Dark Valley, which is great!
Unfortunately, they drop you off at the other end of the valley, which apparently stretches over half the main non-Powder Desert part of the continent. Typical.

- Along the way, I run into a burned out house with a readable note left on the fireplace mantle reading ‘How to get out of debt!’
He burned it down to collect the insurance money. Heh.
Then I notice the burned corpses next to the bed.

… Damn it, Enderal. Why you gotta be like this.

- I picked up a little spell called Death Storm last time I was in Ark. Off the Order mage supplier. Sometimes I wonder about this place, but there’s that saying about gift horses…

Verdict: not really any better than summoning up a sharp bit of ectoplasm to stick in some bandit’s guts, but it does pretty good damage if the enemies bunch up. Three seconds in the storm is enough to murder the average marauder or wild mage, but it does eat your own health and mana, which is unfortunate.
Mostly, it’s nice to have variety sometimes, and I can appreciate throwing green lightning storms at people just as much as the next lich.

- I also wander by the Westpoint Monastery.
Naturally, I head right inside like I own the place.
Marauders and wild mages put up moderately stiff resistance, but I feel like I’m around 5 to 10 levels above what’s needed to crack this place open. Nice looking place, I’ll give it that.

What animal is that, seriously? Mammoth? Mysterious tusk-fish?
Although the scholars seem weirdly obsessed with books about a type of crystal jellyfish whose venom causes loss of appetite, melancholy and ‘notorious’ rage attacks, and then six hours after the sting the patient begins to rapidly age. Healing magic and tinctures prove ineffective.
That’s metal as hell, holy shit.

- There’s a spot where ballistas have fallen inward off the walls and cracked the floor, letting me squirm inside and drop down. Well, who am I to avoid an invitation like that?
Down below is a partially submerged room with an attractive layout. Very clean, very symmetrical. I like it. Pretty standard skeleton residents, nothing fancy like ghost monks or alchemists. A rather badass note reads:

“Here we sing to honor the dead. May they live on in our voices for all eternity. We are the liable carriers of an inhuman burden. What once was, shall sink in the sound of chaos, the old order lie before our feet in shambles. We will stride across mountains of humans and know no mercy.”

What inhuman burden? Why do you talk about ‘striding across mountain of humans (presumably corpses) like you don’t belong to the species? Did a skellington with a poetic soul write this? Are we gonna find vampires in this joint, waxing lyrical about their dark burden?

I wish there was some follow-up backstory explaining this, I’m feeling slow today.
Following a light swim and a grate-and-lever puzzle (the puzzle is ‘find the underwater lever to open the portcullis’), there’s a proper castle area only lightly choked with what look like grape vines just turning colors for the autumn. I wonder if the old monks-or-whoever grew grapes and it got a bit out of control, or what. I mean, for all I know the grapevines murdered all the old inhabitants and used their blood to water its fields. Who can be sure, with Enderal?

It’s pretty, however it got here. I’m starting to feel crypt envy, and when that happens I know what comes next.

Yep, another one of the Darkhand clan. Sabat Darkhand, this time.
I kinda feel like among lich-kind, these are the Joneses. You know? Like, sure, my place in the noble quarter is nice enough, but this place has character.

- … Does that mean the poetry in the note earlier is Sabat’s? He’s not bad, if so. I mean, Prince Adreyu of Mith (of the poetry anthology Lyrical Gushes and Other Fluids, natch) is nice but it’s good to have variety.

- Getting into Dark Valley proper, it has something of the character of say, New Hampshire. Mountainous and studded with evergreens like pines or fir trees, wooden buildings (abandoned, natch) that look like they were built by lumberjacks, like that. It loses out a bit to more extreme biomes like Goldenforst, The North or the Powder Desert, but nice enough I suppose.

Lots of Wood Elementals.
I’m still not entirely sure how the Enderal Spriggan-equivalents work, but they seem to get a one-off Charm spell, which would explain that one time my Elemental Wolf went Brutus on me in the middle of a fight with a Goldenforst Matriarch.
After killing one, I’m often assailed by a green-veined undead, bandit or, in one notable case, bunny rabbit.

If I move, it follows. Is it… is it trying to nibble me? I don’t think SureAI gave it a bite attack. It’s adorable, whatever it’s doing.

- Following a sidepath lit up by Wisps, I find an Abandoned Alchemist Camp with an interesting note:

“My investigations bore interesting fruits. The cave near my camp … houses a much older, apparently undiscovered complex of ruins. Maybe there the last ritual ground can be found. How exciting! … I could trace the magic spell to the deserted cloister very close by. If I get to visit all ritual sites the gates could open up by chance. What will await me beyond? What’s the purpose of this ancient building? Soon I will know.”

It feels like a quest hook of some kind, but nothing got added to my quest journal. I wonder if this is sidequest material, or could this be something to do with the main quest’s endgame? Travel around the various Pyrean ruins activating ritual sites to open the ‘gates’ to the mysterious beyond?
I could dig it.

- The address of the painter I’m given is a moderately ruined-looking home butted up against a cliff, with tattered banners but a neatly-kept frog pond complete with lily pads and croaking SFX. Nice.
Inside is a fire elemental and the painter I’m looking for hiding behind a portcullis. She doesn’t care for visitors, but I’m a little impressed because at least she’s still alive. A cut above the average kooky hermit; that poor guy out in the Powder Desert who accidentally wound up sharing his library with a Desert Spider Queen could learn a thing or two, if he hadn’t been horribly murdered even before I got there.
The elemental is her idea of a trap. I’d dock points for putting a monster made of fire in a room with rather a lot of presumably-flammable paintings, but since the paintings are part of the background they don’t even get jostled by the fiery explosion of the elemental’s end. Convenient!

- She sounds surprisingly sane, for a middle-aged lady touting the merits of a haunted battlefield as an artist’s inspiration and an infusion of dawnflower and children’s blood applied to the skin as a moisturizing tonic.
(A joke, probably, unless she tries to exsanguinate me later. These are the risks you take, visiting Enderal’s scenic vistas).
She doesn’t sound very complimentary about her daughter and son-in-law, although she seems to think selling all of her paintings is somehow a mark of poor business…? Maybe she’s in the painting business for the love of the game, and trying to get rich off it offends her artist’s sensibilities.
Anyway, she wants me to get back a painting some jerks stole (and coshed her on the head during a sitting, in the bargain). This sounds innocent enough, except that the quest marker says ‘Locate the effigy.’
If this turns out to be some Dorian Grey thing and I have to retrieve a painting of an old lady who is slowly getting older… well, I guess it’s fine? As long as it doesn’t try to eat my face or something.
It’s pretty hard to throw shade, these days. Rocks, glass houses, etcetera.

The Takeaway:
Nothing much going on here, just wandering around taking in the sights and getting my bearings again. I wish these random open-world worldbuilding tidbits had some more meat on the bone, but there being any worldbuilding at all in my random side content is welcome.

- Anyhoo, after wandering around some more fighting, in no particular order:

Skaragg soldiers in a literal hole in the ground

Skaragg soldiers in a rather nice hole in the ground, complete with a well-stocked modern alchemy room and of course, the room where they placate their probably-evil gods with human hearts. This room is, for some reason, underwater. Seems inconvenient as hell to take a long underwater swim every time they want to do their ritual sacrifices, but who am I to tell you guys how to live? Maybe the upper altar is for everyday sacrifices, and then the arts and crafts project one in the secret room is for special occasions.

An ancestral mage-ghost in the cellar of an abandoned general store

A cellar with a note explaining that some asshole played a cute practical joke and hid the key to the Massive Chest up high, and you have to shoot the bucket it’s in with an arrow to get it down

A vatyr camp containing two tents but only a single, solitary (purple-furred) vatyr

Vatyr running some kind of, and I shit you not, logging operation. Who is buying these wheels you're producing??

Soil elementals in an area with trees that look suspiciously like crystal jellyfish. Just in case, I try not to touch anything likely to magically envenom/grandma me, which is probably everything

A jaunty skeleton taking a nap using his overstuffed backpack as a pillow

The Bone Farm, which I’m a little sad to say is a graveyard and not some kind of necromancy-powered organic produce situation

At least two separate bandit camps. A wild mage says ‘Crocco ain’t gonna like this’, who I assume is some sort of local bandit boss or something? Nobody I’ve met yet, as far as I know

At this point, I’m practically to Fogville already. I’ve run across most of the middle part of the continent, east to west.

- Regardless, I do find my way to the particular bandits that took Braveblood’s thing. God bless the minimap marker.
One thing I notice is that there are some surprisingly nice chandeliers in this mine, situated just above a perhaps unnecessarily large stockpile of black powder. Enderal presumably doesn’t have OSHA.
There’s also some running streams feeding into a bog at the bottom of the mine, with what looks like more Pyrean statuary, or a carved wall or something, complete with the crystal that keeps sprouting up around all the old Pyrean stuff. The Pyrean Stuff is blocking any path forward though, probably why we have the standing pool of water down here in the first place.
There’s a notebook explaining that these guys are either in league with the Arps over in Fogville, or haven’t noticed Fogville is Arpsville now; they plan to transport ‘the next shipment’ to the Fogville port and then away from Enderal. I wonder where it’s going? Nehrim, or any other part of the world that isn’t invading us right now? More importantly, they call the Order ‘the Steel Crabs’, which is adorable.

- Also, at one point a painting starts talking to me. Of course Andrasta is sealing people into paintings to secretly murder them. I’m not even surprised at this point, I do have basic pattern recognition.
Apparently the two thieves were a pair of ‘witch-hunters from Arazael’. You’d think I’d have heard of every major country in this world by now, but no.
The witch-hunters were, naturally, there to kill her for sealing the nobility of Ark into her paintings.
Also naturally, they decided to get her to drop her guard by… agreeing to a sitting, to be painted.
… Rys, I have no sympathy for you, man. How did you think this would go, exactly.
Well, a little sympathy. They did some autotuning or something to make his voice all echo-y, but he is pretty broken up about his partner/lover Lyf getting killed by bandits. Good emoting. A little overblown, but you kind of want that in your ‘I got turned into a painting and my lover got murdered by bandits’ scene.

- One interesting tidbit Rys drops is that the people she paints behave like normal, but they’re naught but puppets. Like Lost Ones, is how Rys describes it.
Now honestly, I kind of assumed the Lost Ones came back hating humans for still having everything they aren’t, or something. Rys seems to think they’re just going through the motions. Their motions just happen to involve murder, but then, this is Enderal.
Murdering everything that crosses your path out there is basically just a defense mechanism.

- Welp, not sure how this is gonna go down, but I head on back to Braveblood.
Rys recommends I ignore her honeyed words and stab ‘er, but I like to give my psionic murderesses a little time to chew the scenery before I whip it out.
Now on the one hand, she’s murdering Ark citizens. On the other hand, they’re nobles and in Enderal. So odds are good they’re god-fearing, slave-keeping, xenophobic assholes doing something to deserve it.
She also goes on the attack against the witch-hunter, talking about the Purge of 8182 or so, where thousands apparently died for following a woman who disavowed the Lightborn Order. Of Free Folk boys and girls hunted down for ancestor-worship instead of following the Lightborn.
Now, it’d be super nice to be able to ask about ALL of this, but she’s not really giving me much to go on and forced Rys back into his painting so he can’t talk either. I have to make the decision blind.
You’d think there’d be some kind of middle ground, you know, vet her choices. ‘Only go after nobles like that one who’s got a stranglehold on the farms’, like that.
But I am busy I guess, can’t just be taking time out of the busy schedule to fact-check some potential murders. I mean, I’ve got a couple friends in the Order now, and Tealor Arantheal has a goddamn statue. He’s totally the type to sit for a painting.
So in the end I have to go with the ‘less murder’ crowd, and stab her good.
(This one doesn’t count.)

- Rys wakes up back in his body, which is one of the better ways this could end, really. Because I certainly don’t have any spells to drag a soul back out of a painting. I guess I do have Soul Trap, so I could maybe stick his soul in a rock instead…?
He does sound regretful about the child-murdering, but we can’t really hash it out much there, either. He just wants to take his lover’s corpse and GTFO.
Mannn, and I’m gonna have to come up with something to tell Erica later, too.

The Takeaway:
Not a bad sidequest, certainly. Better than, say, the one with the brother and his druggie sister, or the one with the plague mushrooms. But there’s not quite as much meat on the bone as I’d like, you know? You get some moral choice I guess, hints of some good old fashioned Spanish Inquisition stuff, but we don’t really dig down into it. I got more depth out of Arantheal regretting the riot than this bunch.
You could get a real spirited (geddit? Because one’s in a painting) debate between these two; was Braveblood there for the Purge? How long ago was 8182, anyway? Rys could give some reasons for why murderin’ Free Folk mages was a good thing, or at least morally gray. I mean, considering the number of small gods like Kor in this setting, there’s probably a good argument that could be made for not leaving mages free to contract and do who knows what for/with them.
But we don’t. So it all feels a little… fizzle-y.

I think the events of the game take place in 8234, so it happened give or take 50 years ago. I think there might be a mention of this purge somewhere in the Suntemple, in a book or even in a conversation, but I could be wrong. I also think that if you keep her alive there is some kind of option for her to 'kill less' or something like that.

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Freedom is not just another word for nothing left to lose - it means having nothing left to prove...